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Your Life In A KissBest Kisses is a unique user-generated kissing photo website promoting the power of love one kiss at a time. Send us your photo kisses, captions and love-notes. New photos post every Monday. It's simple! It's your life in a kiss.

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Books

I've found as an artist that it can be expensive to play it safe and
remain quietly neutral—by contrast it's a huge risk to go first
and take the creative lead into uncharted territory.

The other option of
course—is to become the spoil and take on the role of the negative voice
aimed at shooting down new ideas by helping to uncover all of the risks. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered that individual at companies I've worked at both large and small.

You know, the "let's play it safe" person who gets everyone to pause, doubt and fear change. While that role has some short term rewards, it can eventually turn back and
bite you like a sidewinder slithering in the dark.

If I'm being truly honest, I
would love to have everything I create as an artist be embraced because
it's so easy to mistake that embrace as personal acceptance. That
temporary comfort that's the opposite of feeling rejected.

The trap
is that no matter how much of my work sells, how much of it is accepted
or rejected, I'm still an artist—I'm not my art.

"When
the project is embraced, it feels as though you're being embraced—and
so rejection must mean precisely the flip side, that they hate you,
because they hate your work. But that's artistic suicide."

"It's
not useful to put yourself on the line, life or death do or die. You are
an artist, NOT the art. The only way to be vulnerable and go to the
edge, is to realize that if your art doesn't work — you'll be back
tomorrow with more and better art." Seth Godin

The simple truth is that anything
worth doing is going to make you feel fear. If you have passion for
something, I encourage you to step out into it, boldly and even blindly if necessary. Try it.

It isn't about how safe can you go—but rather how far can you go in pushing your own creative limits. Doing the unthinkable.

If you suddenly get this uncontrollable feeling that you might be doing something crazy—you probably are. What's wrong with that? Nothing at all—because you are an artist, you are not your art.

As Mr. Godin would remind us about the creative process— it's better to be sorry than safe. I learned to apply the opposite of that. How about you? Unlearning it is the hard part.

A new children's book authored by Ricardo Cortes teaches kids all about marijuana conveying that "It's Just a Plant". The book chronicles a child's path to learning about marijuana from a host of colorful characters including a group of street thugs, a farmer and an unfortunately timed cameo appearance by Bill "I never inhaled" Clinton as himself.

"It's Just A Plant"(a children's story of marijuana) could possibly be the modern hippie version of "Are You My Mother?" Cortes may be an undiscovered literary genius of a different kind destined for his rightful place atop Oprah's Book Club.

Seth Godin recently asked his readers to share their copy of his book "The Dip" in a post entitled "Would you do me a favor?" At first I thought that Mr. Godin was a bit off his gourd with such an oddball request to loan my copy of The Dip to someone. But then something magical happened.